Naked Angels

‘Were you in prison some time?’ Evangeline asked him.

He started coughing again. ‘Jesus!’

‘Only I wondered why you never came to see me when I was small.’ She sat up straight now, as her grandmother had taught her.

Nico pursed his lips. ‘No, I wasn’t in prison, Evangeline. I just … kept out of the way, that was all. Your mother had a new life. You had a new father. What was I supposed to be hanging around for? Did you want me to turn up every Sunday and take you out to the zoo or something?’

Evangeline shook her head.

‘No, well, there you are. I didn’t want that either. Neither did Thea, though she never said as much.’

‘Where are they buried?’ Evangeline asked. Nico did not have to ask who she meant. He stared at her. A nerve in the side of his face started to twitch.

‘You want to know where they’re buried?’

Evangeline nodded – yes.

‘Why?’

‘To visit,’ she whispered. ‘I think I must have rights.’

Nico nodded slowly. ‘OK,’ he replied. He didn’t say where they were or when they would go, though.

‘Did you love my mother?’ Evangeline asked.

‘Everyone loved your mother,’ Nico told her. End of conversation.

Nico worked at night quite often and Evangeline was left alone, which was fine because no one was ever really alone in an hotel. Then Grandma Klippel found out and said things had to change. She phoned one night while Nico was out and when he came back she phoned again and Evangeline watched his face go red as he listened to her. ‘OK,’ he kept saying, ‘OK.’

A girl turned up the following night – a big, fair-haired girl with a funny voice, called Nettie, whom Evangeline didn’t care for much. Nettie smiled a lot but she was also a mess-maker, which Evangeline didn’t like as she had to follow the girl around the place, plumping up cushions and picking lint up off the carpet.

Nettie had her own smell, too – not unpleasant, but different. When she started taking Evangeline to school she would make her wait round the corner where the other kids couldn’t see her, just in case. Then Nico was out more and Nettie just sort of moved into the hotel with them. Evangeline found her sitting there one morning, ordering juice from room service.

‘I don’t know that my grandmother would want to pay for a stranger in here, too,’ Evangeline said, but Nettie just laughed. She wasn’t fat but she had a small double chin that was pink, like the rest of her.

Her clothes arrived the following day and Evangeline had to crush up in the closet to give her some space. Her clothes were strange, not useful things at all, just cropped-off trousers and a few little tops, like a kid would wear.

Nico told Nettie to teach Evangeline the facts of life but Nettie had her own way of dealing with little things like that. One night when Evangeline got up for water Nico’s bedroom door was pushed wide open and the light was on. Evangeline walked past and saw Nico on the bed with his back towards the door and Nettie sitting naked on top of him, riding back and forward like a cowboy at the rodeo. She waved when Evangeline tiptoed past and that must have been the first Nico knew of it because she heard her father swear loudly and Nettie was gone the next day.

‘You didn’t have to get rid of her,’ Evangeline told Nico over breakfast.

Nico kept staring at the newspaper, though she could tell he wasn’t reading. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it was what I wanted.’

Evangeline squirted syrup over the top of her boiled egg. It tasted quite good, if you didn’t mind the feel on your tongue. No one stopped her, and so she did it.

‘She smelt funny,’ Evangeline said.

‘How would you know?’ Nico was looking at her now. ‘You had the place filled with air fresheners.’

Evangeline nodded, ‘Because of her smell.’

‘Don’t be rude,’ Nico told her, ‘and stop cleaning the place up. Housekeeping is paid to do things like that.’

‘They don’t get all the dirt,’ Evangeline said. It was important to her. Grandma Klippel didn’t have dirt in her house. Evangeline wanted the place nice for Nico.

‘Stop biting your nails,’ Nico said. He said it even when she wasn’t. She let her hair flop over her face and chewed that, instead.

So Nico had to take Evangeline out to work with him. She could see how little he liked the idea but she was overcome with excitement. He wouldn’t tell her what he did. When he finally told her she didn’t even understand the word.

Paparazzi. It sounded strange, like an Italian ice-cream flavour. It wasn’t the only job he did, but it was one way he earned money. The other ways were more boring, like chauffeuring local businessmen to and from their offices. Nico was half-Italian and most of the businessmen were, too. Evangeline looked his job up in the dictionary but what she read didn’t seem to fit. Nico just photographed people in a club – ordinary sorts of people. Most of them looked pretty much like Nico himself; dark-haired and itchily nervous in their suits. They stood next to their wives and friends in groups and they all smiled warily as Nico counted to three. When the pictures were over they looked relieved and started laughing.

Evangeline wasn’t allowed inside the clubs but Nico got her in anyway. She was proud of him for being able to do that. She would wait by the door while he discussed the matter with a few men in the entrance and then he would grin and wink at her and she’d run in after him. They were never inside for long; just long enough to smell the new carpets and the alcohol, though, and to catch a glimpse of the bands that played on stage in their white tuxedos and orange toupées.

Evangeline loved it all. She loved the noise and the pushing crowds and the perfumes and the heat but most of all she loved it because she knew Grandma Klippel would have a seizure if she knew she were there.

People spoke to her. She became known as Nico’s daughter. One man gave her a fifty-dollar note and a pat on the head, and a woman in an expensive satin dress gave her the paper umbrella from her cocktail, which Evangeline liked even more than the money. Nico watched her like a hawk all the time, except when he took the photographs. Then he would sit her on a bar stool and tell the barman to check she didn’t move. The barman would wink at her and send a glass of cola spinning down the bar towards her, just like he did with the beers. Sometimes he put a small plastic stick in the glass with two cherries speared on it.

Nico would always be late up the next morning so Evangeline would order breakfast and get out the small paintbox Grandma Klippel had packed with her things. She tried to paint something every day, just as her tutor had told her to. Nothing looked like anything much, they were all small pale shapes in the middle of the page; sometimes she couldn’t even remember what it was she was painting.

One morning Nico caught her at work. He began a laugh that turned into a cough and when he had finished coughing he turned the pad around and gazed down at the smudge of pale colour in the middle of the page.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. Evangeline chewed at her hair.

‘Is it some fruit, is that what it is?’ He held it up to one eye at a time, as though he needed glasses, then he turned the picture around slowly. ‘I didn’t know you were trying to paint,’ he said quietly. Evangeline’s hair smelt of cigarette smoke.

‘Did your mother teach you?’ Nico asked.

‘No.’

His eyes looked dark, like the coffee he was drinking.

‘Who, then? Darius?’ It was the first time she had heard him say the name. It sounded strange. He pronounced it wrong: ‘Dar-i-us'. She longed to correct him but thought it might have been deliberate, like the way he was always calling Grandma Klippel ‘the old lady’.

‘My grandmother hired a tutor,’ Evangeline told him. She washed her brush in the water-pot and cleaned it carefully on a tissue. She couldn’t work with him watching.

‘You had proper lessons?’ Nico sounded surprised, ‘For how long?’ ‘Months.’ ‘Months?’

Evangeline nodded. She could feel her eyes filling up but she didn’t want to look a child in front of her father, in case he was laughing at her.

‘She wanted you to be like your mother.’

‘And Darius.’

An angry muscle twitched on Nico’s cheek.

‘And what did you want?’ he asked. Evangeline pushed more hair into her mouth. ‘Did you want this?’

‘I didn’t mind.’ Her voice sounded small. Nico was staring at her.

‘Why not, Evangeline? You mind everything else! You mind when there is dust on the table, you mind when I smoke, you mind when the coffee’s not warm, you mind when I dent the couch – why didn’t you mind something as important as this? Do you enjoy it?’

She nodded. Then she thought. Then she shook her head.

‘Then you should stop. Don’t be Thea. Be yourself.’

‘I want her to be proud of me.’ It came out in a small stupid whisper.

‘Your grandmother?’

‘No. My mother.’

Nico sighed and lit a cigarette. Evangeline wished he had done the trick where he threw it into his mouth, it might have lightened the atmosphere a little. He ran his hands through his thick dark hair. She could tell that he was thinking.

‘Come with me,’ he said at last. Evangeline got up. ‘Do I need my coat?’ ‘Bring it,’ Nico said, ‘bring your whole wardrobe if you like. Only hurry up.’

12

They went round to Nico’s apartment. Evangeline had never been there before and she liked it twice as much as the hotel. It was in a converted warehouse down a small side street and they had to use a service elevator to get to Nico’s floor. The building was old and huge and wonderfully empty. You could have got a whole car into the elevator and the thing was open so you could watch each floor as it slid by. One floor was just empty space and a bird flew out when the elevator went by. Its wings made a whirring sound.

The main door was covered with locks. Nico undid each one slowly, cursing under his breath when he got the wrong key.

‘I like it here,’ Evangeline told him.

‘You’d like to live here?’ he asked, and he laughed when she said that she would.

‘Just you and a few moth-eaten pigeons, eh? Now how do you suppose the old lady would like that one?’

Evangeline pulled a face. ‘If you got my money we could live just about anywhere we wanted,’ she said.

‘I told you, I tried.’ End of story. Non-negotiable.

The door fell back, emitting a distinctive smell. It was an empty smell, a smell of nobody having been home for a very long time. It was unpleasant at first but after a while you didn’t notice it so much. Eventually you didn’t notice it at all. The apartment was warm and there was condensation on the windows. Nico cursed and went off to see about the heating. Evangeline snooped around each room and Nico didn’t stop her, which was nice.

‘It’s OK,’ she told him when she’d finished. ‘You should clean it up, though.’

‘I don’t live here now,’ Nico said, ‘I just come here when I need to.’

Evangeline shrugged. ‘It would still be nicer clean,’ she told him. ‘You never know, after all.’

‘You never know what?’

‘You just never know, that’s all. You might get rats or something. Somebody might break in and see all the mess. I don’t know.’

Nico shook his head, tapping his finger against his forehead. ‘You know you are a little crazy, don’t you?’ he laughed. He didn’t look comfortable, not even in his own home. He picked up a handful of mail from the mat and began sifting through it quickly.

‘There’s a room locked,’ Evangeline said.

‘I know. That’s where we’re working.’

‘Today?’

‘Yes, today.’

He made coffee, which drove Evangeline mad with impatience.

‘We just had coffee!’

‘I know, but I always drink coffee when I work. It’s kind of a rule. Black, too. You’d better get used to that yourself.’ They drank black coffee that made her shudder. She washed up and dried before he could pour a second cup.

There was another unlocking ritual and then she was inside her father’s workroom. It was small, no bigger than a bathroom, and dark, because the windows had been boarded over.

‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘Why are you whispering?’

Because it was like being in church, she thought: weird, silent. Darkness made your voice sound funny, so it was better to whisper. Nico clicked a switch and a bare red bulb bathed the room in an eerie light.

‘You OK?’ Nico asked. He didn’t know if she was scared of the dark. ‘Uh-huh.’ He heard her swallow.

There were tables and a sink and some washing lines overhead with metal pegs hanging from them. Evangeline held her hand to her face to see what it looked like in the red light. Nico tossed something into the air a couple of times and then threw it at her. She caught it, which was good. It was a film.

‘They’re the shots from last night,’ he said. ‘We’re going to print them up. This is my darkroom, Evangeline. This is where I work.’

She rolled the film around in her fingers. ‘You work in the clubs,’ she said.

‘No,’ Nico told her. ‘I take shots in the clubs. This is where I work. This is where the magic is done. Did you take a look at the people I photograph? Eh?’

Evangeline nodded.

‘Pretty? Yes or no? No. Right. You know that they’re ugly. I know that they’re ugly. But what do you think they know about it, eh? Well I’ll tell you. They think they look great. They think they look so good it’s a wonder the mirror doesn’t pay them to look into it.

‘What they see when they look into the mirror is not what you and I see, Evangeline. They see Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida; what we see when we look at them is a baboon’s arse, if you’ll pardon my French. Now, they pay me to take their photo. What do you think they want to see when they get those shots back? Curtis and Lollo? Or a monkey’s arse?’

Evangeline laughed.

‘Right,’ Nico said, ‘so therefore the magic. Anyone can take a photograph, Evangeline. It’s making that photograph look good that counts.’ He bent his head closer towards hers, ‘The old lady wanted to teach you how to paint pictures, Evangeline. She wanted you to be like her son and your mother. Well, you’re not, so don’t bust your whole life trying. Maybe you have talent, maybe you don’t. You’re not happy with paint and paint isn’t happy with you, that much is obvious.

‘But there’s more than one way to create pictures, Evangeline. You see an image and you record it for others to see. Then you dress it up a little, make it look better than it already is. That is true of great artists, but it is also true of great photographers.

‘Photographers and artists see exactly what we all see, Evangeline, but it’s how they translate those pictures that makes them good – understand? Right, let’s see what we can do with a group of baboons’ arses, shall we?’

She had never heard her father say so much before and she would never hear him speak so eloquently again.

She watched enthralled as he took the lid off one of three large tanks and stuck a thermometer into the liquid inside.

‘Twenty degrees.’ He spoke to himself but she knew he was teaching her, too. He leant across and switched the light out and the room became the darkest darkness she had ever sat in before. There were a couple of cracking noises as he took the film out of its canister and then he described how he was loading it onto a metal spool.

The spool went into the first tank and she heard a watery sound as he dunked it up and down. Then he put the lid back onto the tank and switched the dull red light back on again.

‘I have a timer, see? Like an alarm clock. It all has to be timed, like baking a loaf. Six minutes, maybe more – you get the feel of it after a while, but you still time it, right?’ The timer went off as he spoke and Evangeline nearly jumped out of her socks.

The light went off again.

‘Right. Now it goes into the wash. Now I drain it and then it goes into the fix – see?’ Evangeline nodded even though she could see nothing. ‘In the fix for two minutes,’ Nico continued, ‘then I take a look at it – you learn what to look for – then I wash the film for twenty minutes or so. A bit of wetting agent and then we can hang it out to dry.’

The film strips were hung onto the small washing line. ‘I hang them over the radiator here so that they dry more quickly – just enough time for another coffee and some cheesecake.’

‘Fruit,’ Evangeline said, ‘or you’ll get fat.’

‘Photographers don’t get fat, Evangeline,’ Nico said, ‘we’re lean, mean fighting machines. We eat what we will – it’s one of the rules of the job.’

After more black coffee Nico showed Evangeline how to work the enlarger. She hopped with impatience while he did a test strip and then finally he came up with a proper print on paper.

‘See this?’ he asked. She bent over the sheet, chewing her hair. She recognized the faces in front of her. It was a man from the night before and the woman in satin who had given her the paper umbrella from her drink. ‘Baboons’ arses,’ Nico said. They looked gormless and ugly. Nico held up a lady’s stocking. ‘This is where the magic begins,’ he continued. He stretched a piece of the stocking over the lens of the enlarger. ‘Or I could blow on the lens to mist it,’ he told Evangeline. This time the print came up softer and more film star-like. Nico held the shot up to the light. ‘I think she needs a smaller nose and less of a gap between the front teeth,’ he said. ‘He could do with a couple less chins.’

He took the print into the kitchen and sat down with a small box of pens and inks and razor blades. He worked quickly, bending so low his nose almost touched the paper, dabbing, dotting and gently scraping until the shot was finished.

‘There you go.’ He held the photograph up for Evangeline’s inspection. ‘Well?’ he asked.

He was right – it was magic. He had made the couple look like film stars. Evangeline was speechless.

‘You don’t like?’ Nico looked confused.

‘How did you do this?’ Evangeline asked. Nico’s expression relaxed into a smile.

‘You saw how I did it. I showed you.’

‘But this is special. This is perfect. You made things perfect, Nico.’

‘No, Evangeline, it’s just hard work. If you know what you’re doing it’s not difficult. And I’m not that good – there are many more tricks than I’ll ever bother to learn. Look.’ He pulled a book out from under a pile of photographic paper boxes. The book was a large one and full of photographs. Nico sat and drank coffee while Evangeline looked through it.

‘You like?’ he asked. The book was full of shots of old movie stars. Evangeline studied each one closely.

‘You think they’d look like that if you passed them in the street?’ Nico asked. He was smiling at her. He leant forward, pointing: ‘This photographer who did these shots, he was an artist, Evangeline,’ he said. ‘He took the photograph, yes, but then the true work was done. Retouch, retouch, retouch. The man was a genius. I see him sitting over his desk at night, a box of paints and a few blades, just as I have here, scraping, gently, bleaching, eliminating. He created these stars, Evangeline, he did it himself.’

Nico threw another book down in front of her. ‘Never believe what you see in pictures, Evangeline,’ he said. ‘They say the camera never lies, but that is one of the greatest lies of all time. Famous war photographs – look at them. How many do you think were staged, eh? You see a so-so shot and you turn it into something special with a little staging.

‘Do you think Dino Foretti wanted a business portrait of himself squatting in that old cane chair with the holes in it that he works from most days? No. That chair is the truth, but I sat him on a real leather chair, Evangeline, the sort with studs and everything. I draped some satin in the background – red, like presidents use. The result? Not Foretti as he is, but Foretti as he wants to be. Foretti the business tycoon. He was happy, he loved it. Trade in falsehoods, Evangeline, and you have a business. Try to sell the truth, and you end up bankrupt within the month.’

He pointed out one of the movie stars in the first book. ‘You like her nose?’ he asked. He leant forward and his voice dropped. ‘That lady has an invisible wire set up, which is stretched across the set before she is photographed. She leans her nose against the wire and suddenly it isn’t so long. Suddenly it turns up at the end, instead of down. Suddenly she looks like the movie queen she is supposed to be. Now that’s a class act, Evangeline, take my word for it.’

‘It’s great,’ Evangeline said.

‘Good,’ Nico sounded as though he approved. ‘Now, do you think you’re ready to have a go at printing the next batch?’

Evangeline swallowed. ‘Sure.’ She had never felt so unsure about anything in her life before, but she was prepared to drop down dead before she let her father know that.

For an impatient man, Nico was a surprisingly good teacher. He talked Evangeline through the process and he didn’t shout or swear when she made bad mistakes. By the end of the day they were both exhausted and Evangeline had a small print on the table in front of her that was all her own work. The picture was crooked and a little too dark and that made her mad with herself but Nico insisted it didn’t matter – it was the best trophy possible for all the effort she’d put in.

‘You did well,’ Nico told her. He had been surprised to see her so driven and quietly worried by her perfectionism. She was only a kid. Perfection shouldn’t matter so much to a kid of her age. It was like the cleaning and the clearing up she was always at. It was as though she wanted everything right. He wished she enjoyed mess more, like most normal kids.

She didn’t look up, she just sat chewing her hair, but she was more pleased than she was showing.

‘Maybe you’d like to learn how to take shots, too.’ She could hear her father smiling at her and she thought she might burst with pride.

‘You deserve cheesecake now – proper cheesecake from an Italian deli, not the sugary crap that hotel serves up.’ Nico actually put a hand out and ruffled her hair, like she used to ruffle Patrick’s coat when he’d done something extra wonderful. Evangeline didn’t argue this time. Even cheesecake sounded good. When they’d finished eating he let her cut the end of a cigar for him. The other men in the deli laughed at that and she laughed along with them.

When Evangeline woke the next morning there was a large envelope propped on her bedside table, next to the hotel phone. She wiped her eyes and picked it up. Her name was written on the front in Nico’s handwriting. When she opened the envelope a photograph fell out and, when she turned the shot the right way up, she cried out loud as though someone had pinched her.

The shot was the one of Lincoln with the mouse ears, only much, much bigger and much, much fresher. Nico must have done it, he must have taken the shot from her bag and got all the creases out and then copied it just for her. She ran her finger down the baby’s nose and a tear landed bang on the back of her hand. Nico was right; photography was magic. Evangeline knew she was smitten.

13

Budapest 1985

Mikhail stood in the middle of Kapisztran ter, beneath the statue of the monk the square had been named after, and studied the tourists. It was a few degrees below zero that morning but the weather was no longer such a problem. He had a new coat around his shoulders and three pairs of good socks on his feet. In exactly seventeen minutes, when the church clock chimed the half-hour, he would go into the coffee house in National Assembly Street and sit amongst the old women with their white hair and pearls and order a hot chocolate with whipped cream and a slice of sweet pancake with nuts on top.

An American couple walked up to the statue he was standing in front of and paused. Mikhail could spot the nationality from the clothes the tourists wore. Furs for the Italians, and always good quality shoes. Trousers for American women and the men always wore a hat. The British wore inappropriate shoes and carried umbrellas, even in summer. Mikhail waited until this couple were busy reading the inscription on the statue before crossing to speak to them.